Personal Statement - revised
Graduate School Application ·Carnegie Mellon University is my top choice graduate school. My candidacy reflects my exceptional leadership abilities and enthusiasm for computer science. I regard myself as a developer and researcher who can contribute to the world. This is evidenced by my experience of building a successful game studio and an international film and television translation team from scratch, as well as from my personality that attracts open-minded people with a firm sense of achieving goals. Once becoming a member of the CMU community, I will lead and encourage my peers by contributing to the school’s already dazzling achievements.
As a Generation Z person who grew up surrounded by numerous electronic devices, I naturally developed a keen interest in computer science and dreamed to stand on the stage of a product event, like Steve Jobs, to publish a product that revolutionized the world. As I grew older and was exposed to more technological information, I became convinced that AR- technology provides the foundation for the next generation of innovative technologies. Microsoft launched HoloLens II, and while the new version displayed incredible technological breakthroughs, it also revealed that AR-glasses had a long way to go before becoming a mature product,. It is my aim to work toward the continual improvement of this revolutionary technology.
With this goal in mind, I chose computer science as my major and sharpened my skills via my studies and projects. After class training, I joined VMWare as a software engineer intern in July 2021. Six months of close work with several excellent software developers helped me to gain real-world experience while also equipping me with professionalism and ethical skills required in a productive firm. I discussed with my mentor about the best chart to use in a monthly report to illustrate a large machine learning model’s (BERT) performance with several daily data points. I was able to persuade him to use my solution. I also created an automated data processing pipeline to generate performance reports, which greatly boosted my colleagues’ analytical productivity. These shining moments not only gave me a sense of accomplishment, but also strengthened my determination to work in the field of computer science.
After a fruitful internship, I returned to campus and started to explore my passion for research. I found that I am highly interested in exploring and expanding the boundaries of computer science. Although working with my colleagues and mentors in the industry taught me a lot, I believe I will be more excited when I create things that no one else has created or ever dreamt about before. In the winter of 2022, I started my research at the Intelligent Motion Lab, where I mainly focused on designing and implementing a continual learning segmentation system (CLSS). At the beginning of the project, I was tasked with designing engineering-oriented functions to annotate the object and begin model training. I finished the core functionalities of the main toolkit used in the project after many days and nights of learning new web development techniques. I became a full-stack developer who not only completed both frontend and backend development but also understood and modified an important component of our incremental-learning model to accommodate our toolkit.
Following this project, I intended to dive deeper into a more academic side of research. In the summer of 2022, I was selected to work as an undergraduate research assistant with Professor Tarek Abdelzaher to investigate graph adversarial learning on dynamic link prediction. I am in charge of building our experiment infrastructure and reimplementing many baselines (VGAE/Evolve-GCN/Euler) and attacking methods, such as random-attack and meta-attack in this project. Our paper on developing a new model to defend against adversarial global attacks on dynamic link prediction tasks is due to be submitted to ICLR by the end of December. This project provided me with a deeper grasp of research, namely the entire pipeline of a research project from a vague notion to a highly specific thorough article, which confirmed my passion for working in a research lab to develop new technologies and products.
At this point, I am compelled to extend my education because my dream career demands a broader and deeper scope of knowledge. Professional training at a higher institute has been a key priority in my agenda. Carnegie Mellon University, as the world’s best university in computer science, is the ideal solution for me. I explored the program brochure and am excited to find courses like Visual Learning and Recognition and Geometry-based Methods in Vision, which will lay a solid foundation for the modeling and sophisticated calculations required in the construction of augmented reality. These courses will bring me closer to understanding 3D-vision and actual machine perception technology. The Master of Science degree program in Computer Science at CMU embodies my dream program because of the rigorous coursework it offers and also because of the school’s research facility, the Augmented Perception Lab. Since 2014, I have established the objective of creating a wonderful product that can impact people’s lives; I never lost sight of this goal and continue to strive in the connected field. After graduating from CMU, I hope to join Microsoft’s HoloLens project team, which brings together the world’s finest researchers. With 2-3 years of experience in the most advanced AR/VR technology, I will build my own start-up to pursue my ambition.